I have played Grand theft Auto games ever since the first one,and can spend hours upon hours just cruising around and doing my hearts desire. With all of the realism of a living thriving city and starting as a low-life thug working your way to the top,no other games in the same genre can even compete,marvelous story,huge maps,customization,and if you get bored you can just go Postal (see what i did there?) on a bunch of civilians. It is an amazing franchise and i hope number 5 will be as good as the rest. On a side note,the violence in these games are a mere fraction of what is in the Running With Scissors games we know and love. So fellow Postal fans,what are your thoughts about Grand Theft Auto?

Its a good series and I'll always appreciate the amount of work that goes into making such a massive game. I played one through three (beat two), and got half way through San Andreas. I liked San Andreas, but I kinda lost interest in the story.

I've written this on a different forum some time ago. It is slightly outdated:

As a hardcore fan of GTA series, I think that all GTAs released after 2007 sucked. I mean what GTA was always about? Yes, killing cops, thousands of them. You just go out of safehouse, choose a gun, start killing innocent people, then cops show up, then you kill many of them, then eventually your health goes low, you go into safehouse to save the game, then you get out and repeat everything. I've literally spent thousands of hours over the years doing that, hell, I still do that. Now what do we need to make that fun don't stop? We need infinite health and armor spawn and infinite weapon spawns near your safehouse. GTA3, VC, LCS and VCS did it perfectly. You earn health and armor by doing side missions and you earn weapons by finding hidden packages. Any true fan knows that story missions are just the intro, it is when you've seen the credits, the real game actually starts. You now have a whole city to explore and that's the 100% completion that you need to achieve, killing many many cops while doing so. And the nearer you get to that sweet 100%, the more fun is to kill the cops because of those neat bonuses you get to your safehouse. And it's always there, you can always just turn on the game and start killing cops outright without worrying of wasting precious ammo or armor. And I was doing it for hours, at day, at night, at home, at school, at vacation, anytime, anywhere. Once during the summer I've dedicated the whole month to explore every corner of Liberty City to find all of the hidden goods. I took me a week for each island, day by day, hour by hour, house by house, from morning to late night, 8-10 hours a day. And I've found 98 out of 100 hidden packages, all rampages and 19 out of 20 unique stunts. After that, I've looked at walkthroughs to find the remaining ones. And boy, after getting that "You have competed the game, you now have infinite ammo" message, I was so overjoyed like I've found the meaning of life. Did I stop playing the game after that? Hell no. I've spent another 6 months killing cops, without worrying that there are still some parts of the city to explore, without any in-game rewards except criminal rating which I don't care about, having lots and lots of fun. Now that's what I call a true, worthy game. That's Liberty City Stories I was talking about. Other gsme were not so great. I've really enjoyed GTA3, just never got much time to complete it, I'm doing a second playthrough now. Vice City - I did an epic mistake using a walkthrough to find most of the hidden objects and robbed myself of playtime, but I didn't like the atmosphere of the game and was disappointed in it because expected breakthrough of GTA3. San Andreas - they've destroyed magical "10 hidden packages for a weapon" formula, so when I've finished the story, I was like "meh" and stopped playing. SA:MP added some playtime though, but vanilla game generally sucked, but I didn't hate it so much as Vice City. Skipping LCS because I've already said about it, there's VCS, everything is great (except the atmosphere, but I've already seen VC, so meh) except the red balloons. Now those suckers tend to be hidden in walls and near the ceilings. So in order to do a full exploration of the city, you'll need to be in a helicopter. Constantly. That's get broken do to "go to the airport after every house, because you heli just crashed". It was so frustrating to explored the city without worrying of missing a red balloon. So after a while, I guess about 1.5 years, I've said "Screw this" and just returned to LCS and continued to have pure fun until I got to the point that I've tried every possible combination of fighting the police that could be fun. It just could not be fun any more. After about 2000 hours (maybe more) of gameplay. Hehehe, talk about replayability.

And then bad things happen. Steam introduces achievements. GWFL comes to life. GTA4 ships. I was hyped, stunned by graphics and physics, quickly finished the story and started to do all side missions, but something awkward was there. The game seemed fine but something was lacking, something which was the thing I've played GTA for. Yes, it's that infinite killing of cops that was lacking. No more new weapons for 10 or 20 killed pigeons. You have to kill all of them to get an achievement. F**KING ACHIEVEMENT! Do achievements help you kill cops? No. Then why the f**k they are in the game in the first place?! What is this f**king console crap you are selling me?! And so GTA4 began to look the a smelly piece of s**t. Something that was made as a quick cash grab, something that was made without devoting a piece of soul to it, something that didn't deserve to have a GTA in the name, something that was not worth buying. I feel like an idiot buying Episodes from Liberty city, I'm not going to say anything else about them. And then there was a last hope of the revival of the true GTA experience, Chinatown Wars. Nope, miracle didn't happen. In fact, s**t happened. Again.

And that's pretty much it. I think the golden era of GTA was from GTA3 to VCS. I still can't decide between GTA3 and LCS which is the best in the series. If LCS would've been released on PC, it probably would've won.

I've played GTA1, GTA London and GTA2, they were just different. They didn't have that golden safehouse mechanism, but it was great to ride over the cars in a tank and electrify soldiers. But I couldn't do anything without cheats, they were just too hard to enjoy cheatless.

GTA series are not meant to be taken seriously. We don't go around kill cops and anybody that walks after the game. It's a dark comedy and a bit of realism thrown inside.

Vice City was nice. I like how desperate Ken Rosenberg was (the voice actor is William Fichtner, the Mr. Mahone from the Prison Break series) and works with Vercetti for a short while to escape some of the troubles they made. Some of the missions are downright senseless, but hilarious.

Then it was the San Andreas. It is a much more complicated world than the Vice City, where Carl Johnson had to go to three places to get missions done. Of all, I like the design of the city they have made. It feels so Los Angeles, and it felt so like Las Vegas, and San Fransisco. However, I have to say that they don't have checkpoints on more complex missions and including the final one.

The final one was a bit insane: You have to zip through the riots, and then to climb up the building floor-by-floor, exterminate your treacherous aide, then go down the building floor-by-floor, surviving the blaze, and then catch the guy dangling on the fire truck, then catch the corrupt officer. Can't fail any of these in between.

What I like about GTA IV is the simplified interfaces and a better sense of humour in the game. Plus, they have checkpoints and taxis, so playing a mission there is not as tedious as it seems to be.

I'm proudly waiting for GTA V. I would like to see San Andreas in modern times.

I remember installing the 'Hot Coffee' patch that unlocked all the hidden levels. Like where some hoes are blowing the gang members before they come running out at you with baseball bats :-)

It was fun at first, kind of like a ghetto version of postgal but I got bored after awhile. Kind of got too repetitive. I liked Postal 2 and the various add ons better.

I also thought that 'King Pin Life of Crime' was an overall better ganster, urban shooter game. It was Xatrix's swan song before they shut down (Xatrix did Redneck Rampage). King Pin is available over at GOG and its graphics actually hold up pretty well for a 10 year old game. They almost as good as a lot of modern games. Some of the levels in bar rooms and stuff remind me a bit of Postal 2 levels.

i think the GTA series is awesome but after san andreas it started going down hill.San andreas was the best gta in my opinion not just because of the story but because of the two player. not only can you kill thousens of cops and pedestriens but now you can do it with a friend.the gta stories (liberty city stores ect)didn't go well for me. after the greate SAN ANDREAS I was not expecting it to be better. But instead i get something worse than III. Gta IV and episodes were good and i like them alot but gta needs two player (not just online).

Sounds silly but GTA (1, plus London) made the best impact on me. It was one of those very early free roaming games in 3 cities to explore and do missions in. It amused me years thanks to the great level editors and mods. GTA2 is also very nice, especially multiplayer. I bought that game the second it hit the shelves, same for GTAIII, also an awesome game, this time 3d! I played it and enjoyed it, but not as much as GTA San Andreas which I've done loads of mods for and is still one of the most fun game engines to mess around with, in the same spirit why I love the old GTA, easy to mod.

I recently purchased GTA The Complete Collection (or something equal) on Steam, it doesn't have GTA London and the expansion pack GTA London 1961, which is still available for free download. I understood that this game in not property of Rockstar and that's why it's not in the package (I guess that "GTA: The Almost Complete Collection" won't attract much buyers). Rockstar released GTA1 as a classic with an upgraded engine without copy protection, this would be awesome to have for GTA London.

I have a Rockstar Classics collection set that has GTA 1 2 and London 1969,all 3 of them have useless DRM and i tried every no:cd crack and patch out there,none worked,and this version of london 1969 is broken as well and does not work at all (crashes at loading screen),so i just got the free versions of 1 and 2 and play those.

I played San Andreas and I enjoyed explore the very big map, use a lot of cheats, kill everyone, go in cars, motos, helicopters... (I'm sorry, but i don't give a fuck about the story XD), but there's more violence in Postal then GTA. I love both!